Privacy Policy
Decruft · last updated 23 August 2026
The short version
Decruft scans your Mac locally. The list of files it finds never leaves your computer. The app makes exactly two kinds of network request: license checks and update checks.
What stays on your Mac
Everything the scan produces (file names, paths, sizes, which apps you have installed, what you chose to delete) is computed and displayed locally and is never transmitted, logged, or stored anywhere outside your Mac.
The Decruft app has no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting service, and no advertising or tracking SDKs. This website does have analytics; see below.
What is sent, and to whom
License validation: Polar Software Inc. (polar.sh)
When you activate a license and roughly once a week thereafter, Decruft sends to Polar's licensing API:
- your license key
- an activation identifier
- your Mac's local name (for example "Elhanan's MacBook Pro"), so you can tell your activations apart in your receipts
- the Decruft version and macOS version
This is how a purchase unlocks the app and how activation limits are enforced. Polar's own privacy policy governs the data they hold: https://polar.sh/legal/privacy
If your Mac is offline, Decruft keeps working from its last successful check for up to 30 days.
Update checks: your browser's normal web request
Decruft periodically downloads an update feed from decruft.app. The request
includes the information any HTTP request includes: your IP address, the app
version, and your macOS version. It contains nothing about your files.
You can turn automatic update checks off in Settings → Updates.
Website analytics: PostHog
decruft.app can count page visits with PostHog, but only if you allow it.
Nothing is recorded and no cookie is written until you press Allow in the banner
on your first visit. Press Decline and the banner never comes back and no
analytics cookie is ever set. If your browser sends Do Not Track or Global
Privacy Control, you are not asked at all and nothing is recorded.
If you do allow it, PostHog records the page you viewed, a referrer, an
approximate location derived from your IP address, and your browser and device
type, under a random identifier stored in a cookie on this site. Requests are
proxied through decruft.app/ingest, so no third-party domain sees your traffic
directly. Session replay, heatmaps and click autocapture are all off.
To change your mind later, clear this site's cookies and site data; the banner comes back on your next visit.
This is only the website. It has nothing to do with the app, which sends nothing about your files anywhere.
Where your license key is stored
In the macOS Keychain, not in a preferences file.
Permissions Decruft asks for
macOS will prompt you for access to your Desktop, Documents, Downloads, and possibly Full Disk Access. Decruft uses these only to measure and remove the items it shows you. Denying them means some categories report zero.
Deleting your data
Removing Decruft removes everything it stored locally. To release your license seat first, open Settings and deactivate. To have Polar delete your purchase records, contact them or write to us and we will pass it on.
Children
Decruft is not directed at children under 13 and does not knowingly collect data from them.
Changes
Material changes to this policy will be noted in the release notes of the version that introduces them.